Swimming in Dystopia
Chang-rae Lee and Catherine Chung
Swimming in Dystopia

Chang-rae Lee‘s new novel On Such A Full Sea is what you might call a post-post-apocalyptic novel. The world has already ended, the environment already ravaged beyond belief. And that’s when things get interesting. The novel follows Fan, a diminutive fishtank diver and descendant from the settlers from New China, who leaves behind the ruins of Baltimore to journey across a wrecked continent.

The novel is a harrowing end-of-the-world survivalist page-turner, likened to both Cormac McCarthy and The Hunger Games, but Chang-rae “inverts the conventions of mid-century dystopian fiction” (The New Yorker) and “his thorny and clear-eyed vision has created a novel about trusting in heroism, finding splinters of humanity, and looking to the future before it’s too late” (New York Times).

Join us for a special reading with Chang-rae Lee, the author of A Gesture Life and Native Speaker and one of the masters of the contemporary novel.

Moderating the event will be novelist Catherine Chung, the author of Forgotten Country, which Chang-rae Lee called “poetically crafted, shimmering with hard-won emotion, and wholly absorbing. A superb performance.”

The event will take place at Chambers Fine Art, during the show Guanshan Gathering, which will feature video, painting and calligraphy by scholar, curator and artist Zheng Shengtian and calligrapher Wang Dongling—the first time the two have collaborated.

Seats are limited! Reserve yours here.

 

Swimming in Dystopia

Chang-rae Lee and Catherine Chung
Thursday, February 20, 2014
6:30 PM
$0.00
Chambers Fine Art
522 West 19th Street (between 10th and 11th Aves)
New York NY 10011
Upcoming Events
April 4 7:00 PM
[IN-PERSON] CRYSTAL HANA KIM: THE STONE HOME W/ JULIA PHILLIPS
Presented by AAWW and Books Are Magic, join us to celebrate Crystal Hana Kim's The Stone Home, a hauntingly poetic family drama and coming-of-age story that reveals a dark corner of South Korean history through the eyes of a small community living in a reformatory center—a stunning work of great emotional power from the critically acclaimed author of If You Leave Me.
April 30 6:30 PM
[IN-PERSON] SEJAL SHAH PRESENTS HOW TO MAKE YOUR MOTHER CRY, WITH MINNA PROCTOR
Join McNally Jackson and AAWW to celebrate Sejal Shah's HOW TO MAKE YOUR MOTHER CRY, a collection of genre-queer short stories braided with images and ephemera explore the experiences of growing up and living as a diasporic Gujarati woman searching for home. Sejal will be in conversation with writer, translator, and editor Minna Proctor!
May 2 7:00 PM
AAWW & Kundiman Present: Emerging Writers in Conversation
Join AAWW and Kundiman in-person and online for a conversation between emerging writers Hannah Bae, Jen Lue, Gina Chung, and Rajat Singh!